#ok a few asterisks

[whiteshipnightjar]

The Air Again

by Joanna Newsom

June of ‘78 who are you, so arrayed on the banks of Lake Adair. Pale lacuna agape and like the moon in the lake you are not there, my poor canary.

At uncertain behest Maggie blown to the west in a shimmering dust of gold with her pale yellow hair they would call her ‘canary’. And I loved my Maggie so, and that is all you need to know.

But women here ain’t ever glad, not even Emma Nevada, coming back to share her wedding cake. Women here ain’t ever free (and Emma never left) we never leave, we never last we never ask we never stake a claim or complain or take.

Not till I made a play for a parcel that lay on the Amador county line. Had a notion that I’d find employ by-and-by at the Lonesome Willow Mine but they don’t enlist my kind. In the meantime, set to prospecting where I was able and laying my Maggie a table. And when it was warm we would pan, when it stormed play Fan-Tan, and when it was cold they’d come sniffin’ with gold in their hands. 

On and on and again on and on and again, you do what you can.

Take an eighth of an ounce in allowance for the dance, only a dance, if you’re alone and abandoned and cast aside. You know, the pastor tried in vain to ask her hand, even him, everybody did.

And I had a plan but I had to sign away my mine and the deed left us free to scrape and bleed and go to seed and never marry not canary canary canary canary canary canary canary canary canary canary.

In the spring of that year when the tinker was here, gals would hire him to mend their tin. I heard ‘em swarm from afar like a storm in a jar, like a choir of cherubim, singing *him, hymn, hymns.

Whispering, ‘Maggie had gone must’ve skipped with someone’, sounded wrong though it did seem fair.

April turned into May and I looked every day for you, Maggie, ‘til I heard they found a whore with the golden hair on the shores of Lake Adair. On the sluice she was spread loose and languid and dead from the kindness that she had shown. Still she told me her tale lifting veil after veil to expose a grin a-honed, my yellow rose in the lode a-blown.

And though I long to believe as I muddied my sleeve, and I studied the wiccan hap, and I want to revive, she was never alive. But by the grace and the whim, and the wheel, and again, and the wickedness of men.

But what to do then? I hauled myself up from the shore and I called at the door of the foreman. I told him and he laughed.

So, alas, there was savagery there. Left a hole in his heart you could roll a cabbage in ‘A cabbage?!‘ “Oh, no no, just a little one, Maggie, just a little one.”

On and on and again ‘til they saw what I am and I am never done, I am never done.

Went inside for the light, got a paper and a pen, where to begin? Do you sue for the rights? Root* for the strike? Through the alluvium to where it heeds *for I’m putting my own ruin ‘til the end to lure o’er the deed. A noose on a live oak tree bent toward the saloon tent and meant for me and Maggie.

And though it wasn’t him, it could’ve been him, or anyone who had done what I know so many men intended when they came to win. 

So arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant. 

Held a cloth to my hands taking stock of my plans, well, there was something I had to make right. I took his old buggy whip and I lowered a skip in the glow of the sodium lights with a load of dynamite.

Maggie said, “I am here.” And with a touch on the ear, “After thirty years down in the mine, help me lead out the mules help me free the poor fools, let them see for the very first time they were blind, blind, blind.”

Then we rode through the rift and we beckoned to moon reflectin’ and she opened her neck like a stream. I saw the Father appear, heard her sob in my ear like a mob of cherubim, howling “him, him. It was him. It was him.”

So I threw a charge down the shaft in the cart with the pastor who spat and evangelized. He was the last and the worst — canary always goes first — to sing where the waters rise, hear her sing – go on now, Maggie –

On and on, on and on, on and on, and again and on and on on and on and again on and on and again.

Then a knock on the wall and a knock and we all fall in and down and in, and down and in and we pass away. But we pass only the baton man to man, and so they return. Pull the pumps, fill the sumps, for they’re takin’ something; they will never learn, they will never learn. And even if the churn drill and the stamp mill and the Pelton wheel, and the smoking furnace all a-burning, overturning, learning she will never breathe the air again air again air again air again air again air again air again air again air.

Like a screech of a flare, or like they’re reaching for air beneath the smothering eiderdown. Veins of gold, still outstretched in a silent arrest for miles and miles abound.

And if I’m underground let me join in that line, let me toil in that mine, let me find what is hiding there, let me dig where I durst, let me drink when I thirst and let me breathe the peril air.

And breathe for my canary, and breathe. Let me breathe. Let me breathe for my canary, breathe for my canary canary canary, breathe for my — canary always goes first — breathe for my canary canary canary canary, breathe for my — canary always goes first — breathe for my canary canary canary canary canary canary, breathe for my — canary always goes first — breathe for my canary canary canary canary canary canary canary canary.

#joanna newsom #the air again #well that was a mighty task #made me do linguistics research too hahaha #she's a story teller extraordinaire #ok a few asterisks #'root for the strike' or 'route for the strike' both make sense just slightly different meaning but joanna loves a homophone #the same with 'him' or 'hymn' and here i think she's done it on purpose meaning in the official lyrics we might see both in different places #so there i wrote them both out #'for I’m putting my own ruin ‘til the end to lure o’er the deed' this one's a tough cookie i also hear 'open moon' #she does sing about the moon in a couple places here so it'd fit but it doesn't make sense so i'm sticking with the version i wrote out #this was fun thanks for indulging me <3 #jnew5 lyrics #love joanna #jnew

[dailydegurechaff]

It's killing me so much I have to talk about it. Do the people know. Do they know that the men in Youjo Senki are fucking giants.

I talked abt it with a few friends on discord like last month or so, but I need to yell about it on tumblr where more people can become aware.

Using a few images as reference, I did a bunch of measurements by counting pixels using Tanya and Visha (who we have sort of canon heights for) as measuring sticks, and this is what i came up with:

the shortest of them are 6ft? why, studio nut, why

if you want an explanation for my color coding/what the asterisks mean/where the hell did i get these numbers, that's under the read more. but yeah. why are they so tall.

ok so it started upon receiving these two images from a friend (thank you Pumpkin) that give heights for Tanya and Visha

Using some reverse searching I was able to find that these two images come from a game collaboration with a game called Alice Gear Aegis. Whether or not you want to consider the info from a game collab as canon information is up to you, but to me it seems accurate, so all my estimates are based on this data.

Another friend (thank you Luna) provided me these two images that I could use as reference to make some pixel measurements. While the first is a a cleaner looking image, I opted to use the second because it included Lergen, Rudersdorf, Zettour & Anson. I don't really care about the background 203rd members (sorry.)

So I cleaned the image up to get all the lines roughly straight and made them easier to see with some color coding. This is where the color coding on my excel sheet above comes from. This is also the image I used for my pixel counts.

And from here I calculated some ratios. This is where a few discrepancies come into play. So on my excel sheet above I listed that depending on whether you use Tanya or Visha as a measuring stick, you'll get a variance of roughly 10cm/4inches. This is because they're technically not perfectly aligned to one another.

For Tanya shes 140cm tall and 281 pixels. That means 1 pixel is roughly equal to 2.0071cm. When we apply that ratio to Visha though, we should expect her to come out to roughly 321 pixels (160cm * 2.0071). She's 339 pixels though, which would be ~168cm (339px / 2.0071). But we know that's incorrect.

The inverse applies as well. Using Visha (339pixels & 160cm) as a measure, that would make 1 pixel equal to 2.1188cm. That means Tanya is expected to be roughly 297pixels (140cm * 2.1188). In the image Tanya is actually 281 pixels, which would make her ~132cm (281px / 2.1188). Which we also know is incorrect.

This is a weird discrepancy I'm not sure how to account for, so I just said fuck it and went with both options. I set up my Excel sheet to include columns for using both Tanya & Visha as a reference to provide two different estimates, you can choose which you think is more canon.

Personally I prefer to use the measurements calculated using Visha as reference because a 210cm/6'10" Lergen is offensive to my sensibilities. To put it into perspective, I measured the door to my bedroom as 198cm/6'6". I refuse to accept this man being taller than my door.

Ok finally the asterisks:

* Why the note on Koenig? On the image, it's a bit blurry but it looks as though Koenig & Lergen are aligned to the same (pink) line. But when I look at it closely, it really does look to me that Koenig is maybe 1 or 2 pixels shorter than the line. Granted that's not a lot, but there is a small difference so idk.

** Why the note on Anson? In the image, it kind of looks like he's hunched over/leaning down a bit, he's not standing perfectly straight. While he is aligned with Rudersdorf (Green) it could be he's actually a little taller if he stands straight.

#youjo senki #the saga of tanya the evil #not a daily post #non exhaustive list things ive learned from this venture: #im barely shorter than visha #lergen 100% bumps his head on door frames when he's not paying attention #im going to choose to ignore canon and believe that Grantz is NOT fucking 6 feet tall

[claymoresword]

I Choose Her | Chp: 8

Hermione Granger x Slytherin Fem!Reader

Summary: You are the daughter of known death eaters from one of the richest and oldest wizarding family. Are you prepared to abandon everything you know for Hermione Granger?

Pairing: Hermione x Reader

Wordcount: 3.5k

Warnings: smut, nsfw, top!reader, strap on use, hermione has a praise kink actually it's canon, so much fluff it's almost gross

Note: ok a few chapters back i mentioned that it would be the last fun one but i lied clearly bc this one's just fluff

i'm just not ready for it to get dark yet! i got a little carried away with this one but hopefully it's enjoyable bc i had a lot of fun writing it

there's strap on use as stated in the disclaimer but little elements of g!p as well (kinda) i've added asterisks before the smut so feel free to skip it if u don't want to read!

alright thats it, i hope u enjoy, let me know what u think!

taglist: @gvrsto @aweidlich @xxsekhmet @arielj

(comment to be added)

chp 9

The end of term is finally here, accompanied with a feeling of impending doom you just couldn't shake.

You had no choice now but to see your parents.They had sent an owl with a letter containing the date of your initiation. It is in 3 days time.

Waving your wand, the clothes you had folded earlier slowly floated in place inside your trunk. Scanning the room you noticed there were still a lot of things you had to put away. Packing was never something you enjoyed. You actually found the entire process dreadful. Although, the use of magic did make it bearable. You couldn't imagine doing it all by hand.

You suddenly feel your cat nudge your leg slightly with his forehead. A white tabby, you've had him since first year. Basically one of the very few constants in your life. You've always had a love for cats because you found it easy to establish a mutual respect. Sometimes you prefered their company over humans.

He nudges your leg again before meowing.

"What is it sweet boy, are you hungry?"

Walking over to his food bowl you noticed it was still partially full. His water bowl left untouched since you last filled it up this morning.

You watched as he walks up to the front door, he began to scratch at it and you grow even more confused.

Before you could start to question it you hear a knock coming from the other side.

"Who is it?"

Taking a step closer you reached for the handle but decide to wait for a reply before opening it.

"It's me, quick let me in."

An involuntarily smile forming on your lips.

Your cat cleverly moving out of the way as you pulled the door open.

Crookshanks rushed his own way inside before you tugged on Hermione's arm, quickly guiding her inside your room. You looked around making sure nobody saw before closing the door.

Your girlfriend greets you with a long kiss which you happily reciprocated.

Hermione steps away from you and begins to look around as if inspecting the state of your messy room.

"How did you even get in here?"

Hermione smiles before holding up Harry's invisibility cloak.

"Wow, I'm surprised he let you borrow it."

"He doesn't know, I nicked it when he wasn't looking."

Your girlfriend admits proudly and you playfully let out a gasp.

"Hermione Granger, I think I might be a bad influence on you." You quip.

Your hands move to rest on Hermione's waist and she wraps her arms around your neck instinctively.

"I think you might be right."

She says before giving you a quick peck on the lips.

"But I kind of like it." Hermione whispers, inches away from your face.

You smirk, pulling her in even closer.

"Good." You say, matching her tone.

You leaned in with intention to kiss her again but Hermione turns her head before you could.

Quietly studying your girlfriend's expression as she watched the cats. They've long stopped chasing each other around the room they're now curled up licking each other clean on the foot of your bed.

"Do you have to leave right away?" Hermione asks turning her head to look at you once again.

Your hand moves to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

"No. Technically I have about a day before I absolutely have to go home. Why?"

Hermione doesn't answer for a moment instead she fiddles with the pendant on your necklace nervously.

"What is it, my love?"

Your gentle hand on her lower back must have soothed your girlfriend enough as she eventually found the courage to continue.

"Do you maybe want to come home with me and meet my parents?"

Taken aback, you take a few seconds to deliberate but Hermione was quick to mistake your silence for disapproval.

"If you don't want to it's alright. I'd just- I would love for them to get to know you-"

Hermione stutters and you reach out, holding her face with both your hands she's now forced to meet your soft gaze.

"I would love to meet your family. Just as long as you're sure."

Hermione grins, evidently relieved at your response.

"Really? It would help to have you with me, I don't want to be alone when I have to- you know when it's time."

"I understand." You assure her and she visibly relaxes again. Hermione moves to nuzzle her face in the crook of your neck and you take the opportunity to wrap your arms around her, holding her close.

You could only imagine the pressure Hermione must be in. How selfless she is to even consider obliviating her own parents. She will be doing it to prevent the hurt they might go through in the event of losing her.

If it ever came down to it you weren't entirely sure if you could do the same. Hermione's bravery knows no bounds, yet you couldn't find it in yourself to envy her. You admired her a great deal. You want more than anything to preserve her happiness as best you can.

Going against the Dark Lord was one way of ensuring it. So it's something you'll do without hesistation.

"But we can't go anywhere until you're done packing." You let go of her and Hermione gestures to the mess of unfolded clothes scattered across your room.

"I am done."

Hermione gives you an incredulous look.

"Well, mostly." You admit cheekily, enjoying how annoyed Hermione is getting at your failure to take things seriously.

"Come on, I'll help you pack." Hermione tugs on your arm but you don't budge.

"But-" You say grabbing her hand instead, holding her in place.

"Im not sure if you're aware. There are many fun things we could do in my room that doesn't involve packing."

You swiftly pull Hermione closer by the belt loop on her jeans.

A small gasp escapes her lips at your sudden action and you took the opportunity to capture her lips into a searing kiss.

Your girlfriend entertains you for a few moments, kissing you back deeply as she rest her hand on the back of your neck.

Quickly moving your own hand underneath her shirt, resting it on the small of her back. Hermione shudders at the feeling of your warm hand against her bare skin.

You plant a kiss on her jaw, and then her neck, nipping at it before you hear Hermione's breath hitch in her throat.

"Okay let's make a deal." Your girlfriend says trying her best to keep her voice firm.

"We finish packing and–" Hermione stands on her tiptoes so she can whisper directly into your ear.

"I'll let you do whatever you want to me."

You feel a sudden rush of arousal, Hermione always knew exactly what to say.

"Whatever I want?"

Your girlfriend peering at you with feigned innocence. She nods before biting her lip knowing very well the effect it had on you.

════════════════════════════════════════════

"What about this one?" Hermione holds up a dark green pullover that you hadn't seen since the beginning of term.

"Honestly forgot I even had that. We can toss it." Instead of adding it to the pile your girlfriend holds onto it. It quickly became clear what she was asking of you.

"Well unless you want to keep that one–"

"Do you want it?"

You chuckle at the sight of Hermione's eyes lighting up at your suggestion.

"It smells like you." Your girlfriend says under her breath and you feel a flutter in your chest.

"Alright, that's the last of it." You say, shutting your trunk.

You attempt to push it closer to your front door but it barely budged. Hermione notices you struggling and lets out a laugh.

"Here, let me help."

"Excuse me." Your girlfriend whispers before stepping in between you and the trunk, standing close enough that her ass was brushing against your front.

Before you could move out of her way, Hermione bends over. Her ass now flush against your groin. Clearly a deliberate move to get a reaction out of you, she makes no effort to push the trunk.

"Hermione–" You groaned.

"Hm?"

You've seemed to have urged her on as she pushes herself up against your front again. Your hands move to grip her waist.

Hermione stands up right but doesn't try to move away from you.

"Do you find pleasure in taunting me, Miss Granger? You growl directly into her ear and Hermione's hand finds the back of your neck.

You watched as she takes her bottom lip in between her teeth, stiffling a grin.

She really is enjoying is.

You expertly flipped Hermione around by her waist. Capturing her lips with yours kissing her hard. You take her bottom lip in between your teeth tugging at it before kissing her again, your tongue enters her mouth and she lets out a whimper against your lips.

Your hands move to her thigh swiftly, you lifted Hermione up, carrying her to your bed.

She keeps her legs wrapped around your waist, holding you in place.

Hermione arches her back, your groin now flush against hers. You began moving your hips, grinding against her center. Your girlfriend lets out a moan, throwing her head back against the pillow.

You take the opportunity to place a sloppy kiss against her neck, you open your mouth, biting down. Earning a louder noise from Hermione.

"Fuck, you drive me insane."

You say against her neck.

Hermione only lets out another whimper in response. She takes your hand moving it to the hem of her jeans.

"Please, touch me." Your girlfriend pleads.

Quickly obliging, you unbutton her jeans, slipping your hand inside. Your palm finds her clothed center. You apply pressure and Hermione quickly starts grinding against your hand.

She's now a writhing, panting mess underneath you.

The mere sight drove you crazy.

You slip your hand underneath her underwear, your thumb applying pressure against her already sensitive clit. Hermione's grips the back of your neck as she chokes out a moan. You move two fingers to her entrance pushing inside until you were knuckle deep. Your girlfriend's mouth falls open as you began pumping in and out of her at a rough pace.

"Yes.."

She breathes out and you take it as a sign to move your fingers harder and deeper.

Hermione's hand moves to grip the sheets and you knew she was already close.

You try your best to keep the steady pace, made slightly difficult with her walls contracting against your fingers with every stroke.

Your hear her breathing get shallow and her hold on your neck tightens. Hermione moans loudly as the blinding orgasm rips through her.

You pull out of her bringing your fingers up to your mouth, licking them clean. Hermione watches you with a darkened gaze before lifting her head to kiss you, deep and hungry.

You plant a kiss against her forehead before moving off her.

Hermione whines in protest and you only chuckle darkly. You lift your own sweater above your head, signaling that you were far from done.

"Take off your clothes baby, wait there."

Hermione does as she's told.

**

You grabbed your wand quickly before walking towards the bathroom, shuting the door behind you.

Saying the spell as you waved your wand, a flesh coloured appendage appearing by your groin. A makeshift strap on. You found out that muggles had used it for sex sometimes and you honestly thought it a genius invention. You took it upon yourself to conjure your own.

You managed to create a version that was not only functional but allows you to actually feel her. In a way it acted like an extension of you.

Yes. A spell that could go terribly wrong if not done properly ofcourse, but what's a fun sex life without a little risk?

Walking out of the bathroom you're met with the sight of your girlfriend laying naked on the bed.

You make eye contact and watched as Hermione's eyes flit down to the length between your legs.

She licks her lips in anticipation.

"Come closer."

Hermione crawls to the foot of the bed meekly waiting for you to approach.

You stepped closer, hand moving to the back of her head your fingers getting lost in her hair.

You guide her forward and she catches on quickly. Wrapping her hand around your length before running her tongue across the tip, watching your reaction.

"Suck it."

You command and Hermione does exactly that.

Throwing your head back you breathe in deeply, suppressing a moan. Her mouth felt amazing. Hermione was really good at that, she's good at everything.

You feel the tip of your strap touch the back of her throat and let out a gasp.

She is taking you so well.

You groaned.

"Good girl."

Hermione hums in response and continues moving her skillful mouth against you.

You can feel your release approaching, gripping her hair you tug on it slightly, urging her to stop.

"Ok– okay that's enough." You guide her face up, kissing her.

"Lay back."

Hermione leans back and you quickly climb on top of her.

Your length brushing against her core, Hermione rolls her hips desperately.

"Ready?"

Your girlfriend nods quickly, lifting her leg up to wrap it around your waist. Giving you easier access.

You guide the tip to her entrance, thrusting forward slowly.

Watching as her eyes widen at the feeling of you inside her. Her hands gripped your back, fingernails digging into your skin.

You thrust your hips forward again, Hermione lets out a loud moan shutting her eyes.

"Fuck, you feel so good. So tight."

Hermione clenches around your length, her nails digging into your back painfully.

"Faster– please."

Your girlfriend begs and you push forward, harder and faster.

Soon finding a momentum.

Hermione's now moaning and panting at every thrust of your hips. You feel a familiar tightness in the pit of your stomach.

"You're so perfect, Hermione. My sweet, perfect girl."

Your endless whispers of praise only pushing her closer to her release. Hermione's cunt throbbing around your length as her orgasm creeps up on her, hard and fast.

You pant, reaching your own climax soon after her.

You slumped forward, both your chests heaving as you tried to recover.

Hermione places a kiss on your cheek and another on the corner of your mouth.

You move to rest your head against her chest.

"I love you." Hermione utters breathlessly.

You lift your head, brushing a strand of hair out of her face.

"I love you too, so much."

Hermione pulls you in for a kiss, surprisingly soft and tender.

"Can you go again?" You ask and Hermione nods, not hiding the blush forming on her face.

"Good, get on top."

** ════════════════════════════════════════════

The train finally departs and Hermione joins you in the carriage. Sitting next to you.

You draped your arm over her shoulder, pulling her close.

"Last night was amazing."

You let out a laugh at the sudden confession.

"Yes it was." You turn towards her and Hermione lifts her head off your shoulder to look at you.

Her hand moves to your hair, running her fingers through it. She knows you loved it whenever she did that.

"You were amazing." Hermione's voice low, you catch her looking down at your lips.

"Careful."

"Don't get me going, I will have my way with you right here, in this carriage."

You warn, glancing at her lips.

"Maybe you should."

Hermione taunts and you smirk.

You lean forward to whisper in her ear.

"I'd fuck you right here, have you screaming my name for everybody to hear."

Hermione grabs the hem of your jacket crashing her lips against yours. Her tongue enters your mouth and for a second you believed that you would actually have sex right then and there.

"Uh– you lot are in a public space, please show some consideration."

Ginny quips before entering the carriage, sitting across from you.

You stopped making out, Hermione buries her face in your shoulder, feeling embarrassed.

"We technically were in a private space until you came in." You retaliated.

Ginny grins.

You've always liked her, the funnier and overall superior Weasley. You don't hang out often but whenever you did it was always a fun time.

"So Harry told me about the plan."

"He did what–"

"Oh that thickhead." You scoffed.

Hermione shakes her head clearly dissaproving the same way you were.

"Well that's fantastic. Yeah, really great. Who else did he tell?"

You were annoyed. If the wrong person overheard it would be over for you.

"Ok I agree Harry can be thick sometimes but we can trust Ginny." Hermione says, stroking your arm at an attempt to soothe you.

"Yeah relax. Besides, he tells me everything. I promise your secret's safe with me."

You say nothing in response, looking out the window trying to keep a level head.

"Do you really think it'll work?"

Ginny asks and you turn to look at her. Your gaze shifts to Hermione for a moment before answering.

"I've gone over it a million times in my head. It'll work."

You look out the window again.

"It has to." You mutter and Hermione grabs your hand intertwining your fingers.

"Alright."

"Listen, if you ever need an extra hand I can help." The ginger haired girl says lowering her voice.

You nod, giving her a genuine smile. You appreciated the offer.

"Thanks, Ginny."

════════════════════════════════════════════

"That was odd." You say as you lifted Hermione's trunk up the stairs, walking to her parents home.

"What was?"

"The man that drove us here. Do muggles always ask that many personal questions?"

Hermione laughs.

You sat her trunk down on the veranda.

"He was curious, some taxi drivers just enjoy chatting to new people."

Your eyebrows knitted together. You supposed that made sense.

"Oh."

"Ready?" Hermione asks before fishing her house keys out of her pocket.

You give her a nod before taking in a sharp intake of breath.

Opening the door you both step inside.

"Mum, dad, I'm home!"

Her mum comes down the stairs, beaming as she sauntered over to the two of you. Enveloping your girlfriend in a long embrace.

Hermione did look a lot like her mother. Especially around the eyes.

Mrs Granger releases her daughter from her embrace and turns to you.

"You must be y/n, Hermione has told me so much about you."

She surprises you by pulling you into a hug as well. You reciprocated quickly as a polite gesture.

"It's very nice to meet you Mrs Granger, you have a wonderful home."

"Oh please, call me Monica."

She takes her hand in yours and you smile at her gallantly.

A man walks out of the kitchen and rushes over to the three of you, practically lifting Hermione up as he hugged her.

Hermione lets out a real laugh and it's like music to your ears.

"Hey pumpkin."

"Hi, dad"

"Y/n I assume?" He asks, narrowing his eyes.

"Yes sir, that's right. It's a pleasure to meet you." You hold your hand out for him to shake and he pulls you into a hug instead.

You were stunned for a moment.

A family of huggers.

Physical affection was rare in your own family, it wasn't something that was freely given. Any type of affection was something you had to earn, like a reward.

"Come, you got here just in time for dinner."

Hermione's dad lets go of you and guides the two of you to the dining table.

════════════════════════════════════════════

You liked Hermione's parents, they were warm and generous. You quickly realised why Hermione is the way she is.

"Thank you for dinner Monica, it was delicious."

"You're most welcome y/n. I'm glad you're here, we've been wanting to meet you for awhile now."

Hermione grabs your hand on the table giving it a squeeze.

Mrs Granger stands up colleting the plates, she walks over to the sink.

"Please, let me help."

You grab Hermione's plate and yours, giving her a quick smile which she reciprocated.

You are stood silently washing dishes for awhile before Mrs Granger breaks the silence.

"You're really good for her, you know."

You glanced at her but stayed silent and she continues.

"I've never seen her this happy. I'm just glad she has you."

"Thats very kind of you to say Monica but I'm certain that I'm the lucky one."

"Hermione's a very special girl." You respond fondly.

Her mum nods in agreement, tears well up in her eyes and you panic for a moment. Afraid you'd said something to upset her.

"You promise to look out for her won't you? I don't know exactly what's happening in your world right now but promise you'll look after her?"

"Ofcourse. I'll protect her with my life. You have my word."

A tear falls down her cheek and she quickly wipes it away.

"Thank you y/n–"

"I appreciate you saying that."

#hermione granger imagine #hermione x reader #slytherin au #hermione granger #hermione granger smut #hermione granger x reader #slytherin reader #hermione smut

[callsigncurse]

Offense & Defense - (Pete "Maverick" Mitchell x Reader)

[Part Two of the Agents of Chaos series]

A beach day meant to be spent on team bonding has Maverick hot under the collar. Sure, you're his soulmate, but how the hell is he supposed to compete with Jake "Hangman" Serensin, the much younger (than him) pilot who seems to have a soft spot for you? Or, the chapter where Maverick nearly loses you for good. Warnings: Shirtless, Jealous Maverick (which is, let's be honest, is downright deadly) mentions of a bodily injury (to the reader) Disclaimer: Some of these lines (the ones marked with an asterisk) are copied directly from the movie, but I do not claim them as my own! All rights belong to Paramount Pictures and the writers. Words: 3.3K ← part one

flying idiots gc

Captain: We are meeting at the beach today. Bring water and wear your civvies. I'll provide snacks. Chaos: 🫡 Hangman: Hell yeah Rooster: 👍🏻 Bob: Ok Phoenix: Weird, but alright. Fanboy: Whatever you say, man. Coyote: you had me at snacks Payback: Let's goooo Agent: I'll bring the sunscreen 💕 Hangman: lame 👎🏻 Agent: I will kick your ass, Ken Doll Captain: I'm surrounded by idiots.

The sun is beating down on you when you step around the Hard Deck. The sand is hot to the touch, but the ocean looks cool and inviting. It's a beautiful, sunny day, and it lifts your spirits a little. It had been a rough and stressful few days.

You briefly wonder where Maverick is, looking around the beach to see if you can spot him. You haven't seen him outside of Top Gun since the night he walked away from you. You're just about to start walking further down the beach to see if you can find him when your tattoo constricts tightly around your wrist, alerting you to his presence.

He's standing not even a foot away when you turn around. His aviators are perched on his perfect face, his expression completely unreadable. He's wearing a worn black t-shirt and dark blue jeans rolled up, and he looks good. Really good. 

"Hey." He finally offers. It's the most he's said directly to you in the days after you'd first met. The fact that he's been ignoring you for over a week has a hollow feeling growing in your chest, and you merely nod in greeting.

You squeeze your eyes shut for a moment before you huff out an exasperated sound and turn away from him. It's like he's trying to pretend that nothing has ever happened between the two of you, and it hurts. He'd turned his back on your connection, running away from what could be.

"Sweetheart, please." A shiver wracked down your spine at the sound of his voice, pleading with you. You want to turn around, you want to see his eyes, and you want more than anything to love him. But he doesn't want you; he's made that perfectly clear. You weren't good enough.

"Hey, now wait, don't-"

The sound of your friends startles you, but you don't turn around. You just set up your beach chair and wait for them to settle in, too. You can hear Josh all the way in the parking lot bickering with Phoenix over something you don't quite catch.

You'd told Josh about your string appearing a few days ago, right after Maverick had left you standing on the front porch of your little bungalow. He'd fallen silent, completely in shock, but had told you that he'd keep it to himself. You weren't ready for word to get out about your soulmate, especially not wanting to explain that he was completely rejecting the bond.

Hangman reaches you first; his green eyes warm when he smiles down at you. "Hey there, pretty girl. You come here often?"

A strangled sound reaches your ears, and you turn your head to see Maverick gulping down water while Phoenix pats him on the back. He sees you watching him and waves you off. "Went down the wrong pipe; I'm good."

Bob arrives next, surrounded by Payback and Fanboy, with Rooster trailing behind him. You watch as Bob strolls over and bumps Phoenix with his shoulder to alert her to his presence. It was nice to see them getting along; most of you had gotten pretty close in the last few days.

"Alright." Maverick's voice rang out, and everyone turned to face him. "Today, we're gonna play a little game I like to call Dogfight Football. Offense and defense at the same time. Two footballs, two teams, each trying to score as many touchdowns as possible."

The team breaks out into excited chatter, already arguing over who would be on whose team for the game. You briefly wonder why he's got you guys playing games when you only have so much time to train before the mission.

Maverick must've heard your thoughts because you suddenly felt his presence in your head again. He wasn't looking at you, but he was there all the same. It felt like his hands were cupping your face, his thumb smoothing along your cheekbone, just like he had the first night.

"Trust me, you guys need this. It'll be fun, I promise."

His honeyed voice soothes the frayed nerves that have made themselves known over the last few days. You practically purr at the sound of him in your head, but you push that away as quickly as it came on.

"Whatever you say, Captain Mitchell." You respond, and you feel him flinch at the use of his official title. You slam the mental block down quickly, and he flinches again, harder this time. Only you and Hangman seem to notice the captain's strange behavior.

"You good?" Jake's voice breaks through the noise as he sidles up beside you. He throws an arm around your shoulders as he smirks. "You're looking a little jumpy there. Afraid we're gonna run you into the ground, old man?"

You can't hear him, but you can feel him. Maverick is seething, his jaw tight, while he stares at Jake through his aviators. If looks could truly kill, Hangman would've been gone and buried by now. You can't tell if you're more worried about Jake or aroused by the sight of Maverick; he's really hot when he's angry. You're not sure what he's more pissed about—the way Jake is talking to you or the way he's got an arm wrapped around you.

"We'll see." Maverick finally speaks, with a sharp bite to his voice when he answers. He's calmer now, at least, and you push your presence into his mind. Experimentally, you whisper in his head, your voice soothing.

"Relax. This is supposed to be fun, remember? Don't let him get to you."

He visibly relaxes and shoots you a grateful, beautifully crooked smile.

You were prepared for the game, but you really weren't prepared for a very sweaty, very shirtless Pete Mitchell. He'd shed his shirt halfway through the game, leaving his tanned skin glistening in the sun. Your breath had left your lungs immediately, and you were so focused on how gorgeous he was that you didn't see Fanboy running full speed in your direction.

Hangman sees it all go down and swoops in as quickly as he can. He's fast on his feet and has you up in his arms just a split second before Fanboy was about to crash into you. You're breathless, looking up into those impossibly green eyes with a dazed look on your face.

"Hey, pretty girl." He greets you, a smile flashing over his lips as he adjusts you in his arms. Yours are slung around his neck, your legs wrapped around his waist, and you wonder what it would be like to just lean in and kiss Jake Seresin. At least he acted like he wanted you, even if he was a little bit of a player. (Or, so the rumors said.)

"Hey." You answer, one hand gliding gently through the soft, golden hair at the nape of his neck. "Thanks for saving me back there; I thought for sure I was gonna be a goner. Fanboy is heavier than he looks."

That draws a laugh out of him, and you're a little too into the way the sunlight gleams off of his golden hair and tanned skin. "You got it, doll." And then he's setting you down gently on the sand, but he doesn't move away.

"Seriously?"

You jolt, and Hangman looks at you with disappointment in his eyes when he sees the flash of your soulmate string against your skin. "Ah, shit. Did I overstep?"

"Tell him to let go of you. Please."

His voice is a low growl in your head. You're not sure where Maverick even is, but you're sure he's somewhere behind you. You can feel his eyes boring into your skin as you look up at Jake, your face burning with embarrassment. "I'm not sure why he's even mad; he's made it clear he doesn't want to be with me."

"Chaos."

"It's Maverick, isn't it?" He murmurs, still looking down at you with a look of disappointment. "He's giving me a look that's actually a little terrifying right now." He admits, and his hands slip off of your skin and into the pockets of his swim shorts.

You sigh. "Yeah, it is. Just don't tell anyone, okay? He already made it perfectly clear that I'm not what he wants, so it doesn't matter, anyway." You can hear the sadness in your own voice, and Jake just sighs.

"I'll keep your secret. Scout's honor. And he'll come around, pretty girl." He sets a hand on your shoulder, yanking you into him so he can give you a hug. "But if he doesn't, you're totally welcome to give me a call anytime."

You hear Maverick's frustrated growl in your head again, but this time you just shut him out.

By the next day, you're still angry with Maverick. This game of hot and cold with him is getting old, quickly. You couldn't even hang out with Jake without your soulmate (the one who was constantly saying he didn't want a relationship with you!) getting jealous and getting all growl-y in your ear.

Things are tense; no one has yet to complete the mission. Either Rooster was going too slow and holding you up, or Hangman was going too fast and fucking up the rest of his teammates. You were ready to strangle both of them, even if you loved them both.

"Agent, do you have a lock on the target?"

"Negative, this laser is bugging the fuck out. I've got dead-eye." 

You curse out loud, and then your soulmate, the one who has done nothing but piss you off for two days, 'shoots' you down. The fucker even tells you across the radio that you're dead.

*"Coyote, we're out. Maverick got us." You tell him, not even trying to hide how utterly annoyed you are at the captain. Sure, he's just training you to make sure you cover all possibilities, but still.

*"That's a fail, Coyote. Return to base." Maverick repeats, but Coyote's plane is rising even further into the sky. He's not saying anything in the comms and you're getting a little worried now.

*"Coyote? Level wings." Maverick orders over the comms, a panicked edge creeping into his voice. You're watching with bated breath as Coyote's plane starts to nose dive, and then he's free falling through the air.

"Mav, he's in G-Lock. You gotta get tone on him!" Your heartbeat is slamming against your chest, watching your friend's plane start to plummet straight toward the Earth. You knew if he didn't wake up, he was going to die as you watched, helpless.

Maverick's plane goes screaming towards him and you can hear him yelling Coyote's call sign over the comms. After what seems like a lifetime, at the last possible second, Coyote's plane levels out and he starts climbing back into the sky. You can't help but laugh, relieved to see that your friend was alright.

"I'm alright, I'm good." You can hear Coyote now, and you breathe out a long sigh of relief. That had been way too close for comfort, and your heart was still hammering in your chest.

"Good job, Mav." Your plane levels out next to his, giving him a thumbs up so he can see it.

"You did good, Chaos. The tone idea was brilliant."

There's maybe a moment more of calm before the next round of chaos begins. 

"Bird strike!"

*"Shit, Chaos. Climb!" The left engine is out, and you pull hard on your stick to climb higher into the sky. Agent's voice is panicked when he follows up with, "Left engine is on fire!"

*"Throttling back. Shutting off fuel. Extinguishing fire." You rattle off what you're doing, flipping switches and pushing buttons on autopilot. This is what you've trained for, you tell yourself. Stay calm, and everything will be fine.

*"We’re losing the right engine." Agent's sounding a little more panicked, and you take a deep breath. 

*"It’s still spinning. I’m gonna try to restart it." You flip the APU switch and push the right throttle forward. "APU on. Throttle up. Shit, nothing's happening." Okay, now you're starting to panic. It would really fucking suck if you had to bail out.

*"The right engine is out!" Agent says, and yeah, he's full on panicking now. "Chaos, I think this is it; I've got every warning light lit up back here." 

*"We lost hydraulics; I can't control it!" The stick is useless in your hands, and you're starting to lose complete control. You're spinning out, and yeah, this is really not good.

*"Eject! Eject!" Maverick is practically screaming over the radio, "Chaos, Agent, eject now!"

You grab the handle and pull, and you watch as the canopy flies off your plane backwards. You're launched into the air, and there's only a split second before you see Agent do the same.

It's almost peaceful, floating down with a parachute. But then the plane crashes into the mountainside and something metallic shoots toward you, and the last thing you remember is thinking, "Ow, that hurt." 

The next time you wake up, you know you're in a hospital. The room is stark white; there's a heart monitor next to you and an IV attached to your arm. By the look of the clock on the wall, you know it's well past midnight. You wonder if Agent is here too, and if he managed to land okay.

The next thing you notice is the feeling of someone holding your hand. You turn your head, and you are absolutely flabbergasted to find Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, asleep in a chair that's been pulled up to your bedside, holding your hand.

You shift slightly, moving towards him, and you notice that his normally tan face looks pale. He looks like he hasn't slept in days, and his face looks swollen, like he's been crying. "Maverick?"

He twitches, but his eyes stay closed and his hand stays wrapped around yours. One more urgent whisper of his name, and those intense blue eyes of his slam open, and he looks at you like he's seen a ghost. "Oh, thank God." He leans forward, pressing his cheek against your joined hands, and breathes out a sigh of relief.

"What's going on?" Not that you mind that he's touching you or even that he's here, but you're beyond confused.

"Bird strike, you had to eject." He looks back at you, his other hand coming out to cup your hand in both of his. "Shrapnel came flying from your plane and hit you as you were coming down. Smacked you right in the chest. You were bleeding out pretty badly when they found you; you had landed hard and hit your head, too."

"Oh." You frown, reaching up with your free hand to touch the edges of the bandages on your chest. Now that he mentions it, it's throbbing uncomfortably. "What about Josh? Is he okay? How long was I out?"

"Agent is fine; he was treated for some light scrapes and bruising and released the next day. You've been asleep for three days. I've, uh, been here every night with you." He admits, and his eyes are still trained on your face. It's almost like he can't believe that you're awake and that you're okay.

"Shit, I've missed that much?" You struggle to sit up, but Maverick stands and gently pushes you back down onto the hospital bed. "Mav, c'mon, I gotta get out of here."

"No, you don't. Simpson has already released you from the mission." He tells you quietly, and your throat constricts. A chance of a lifetime mission, and you were completely out of commission. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but you were hurt. You need to rest and heal."

You let out a wounded sound, angry at yourself for being in this position. Your plane was gone; you'd put Agent in danger, and now you were going to miss out on this special assignment. Things couldn't possibly get any worse than they are right now.

"Why are you even here?" That's the question that's nagging at you the most, and in your still-exhausted mind, you deserve an answer. "I didn't know you cared that much."

He looks taken aback, but his hands refuse to let go of yours. His eyes are trained on your face, and to your amazement, they're slowly filling up with tears. His lower lip was swollen from being constantly worried between his teeth, and in this moment, he looks almost delicate. Like he's about to break.

"I almost lost you," he whispers, and he sounds devastated. "I haven't even given us a fighting chance, and I almost lost you."

You turn as much as you can, staring at his face with wide eyes. The strongest man you'd ever met was breaking apart before your eyes, and you almost couldn't believe it. Did he really care that much?

"Of course I do." He swipes a hand at his eyes, catching the tears that had started to slip down his face. "I've never not cared. I'm just... Sweetheart, I'm no good at this. I've never been able to keep down a relationship; I have no kids of my own, and my only godson hates me."

You shift in your bed, moving as much to the side as you can before you pat the space beside you. "Lie down, Mav. You're exhausted; how long has it been since you slept?"

He looks like he's not going to do it for a split second, and then he seems to change his mind. He kicks off his boots and carefully climbs in, sliding his arm under you so you can lie on his chest. You're careful not to jostle yourself as you settle down.

"I care about you too, Mav." You tell him, your hand gently drawing patterns over his chest. "I knew the moment I first saw you that you would be everything to me, you know? And you denying us just... well, it hurt. I guess that's why I was letting Jake hit on me at the beach."

He makes a sound in his chest, and you can't help the exhausted giggle that slips out. "Easy, Pete. He's a great friend, and it won't happen again. Not unless you let me go for good."

"I won't." He answers without hesitation, and you tip your head back so you can see his face better. "I think this week has taught me that I care more about you than I thought. When I'm not training everyone, I'm here. I caused quite a stir the other night when they tried to get me to leave. Iceman had to call and make sure I got special clearance to stay with you at night."

Your heart thumps in your chest. "Hey, Pete?"

"Yeah?" He peeks down at you, his dark eyes studying you with that same intensity that always took your breath away.

"I really like you. And when I can get up and brush my teeth, I'm going to kiss you." Maybe it's the exhaustion you're feeling that's making you so bold, or maybe you're just drunk on the overwhelming affection you feel for him. "Because I really, really want to kiss you."

He stares at you for a solid moment, and then he carefully shuffles you so that he can lean down and press a sweet kiss to your forehead. And then he leaves one on your nose, and both of your cheeks. His lips graze yours, so softly that you can barely feel it. Regardless, your body lights up for him, and you meet his kiss with sweet affection.

"Get some sleep, sweetheart." He murmurs, brushing one last kiss against your lips. "I'll probably be gone when you wake up, but I'll be back before nightfall. I promise."

When you wake up the next morning, your bed is still warm from his body heat, and he's left a flower and a note for you where he'd been sleeping.

I'll be back soon. Don't miss me too much.

Love,

Mav.

#pete mitchell x reader #maverick x reader #top gun fanfiction #soulmate!au #chaos!reader

[lewisinho]

a rant about the media narratives surrounding lewis, fernando and max

ok so ever since well, bahrain testing 2023 and the discovery that aston martin do indeed have a fast car (and more importantly, one which is faster than merc), the media have created the alonso ‘hype-train’, saying that this man is basically the third-coming-of-christ (let us not forget about the ‘great white hope’ himself who is the only one standing between nando and jesus himself, but i digress); example are aplenty, as the majority of formula 1’s posts on instagram, twitter etc. being about fernando and even sky making a cute little montage reminding people (who most probably have not watched nando’s glory days) that nando is in fact a two-time world champion, went through nearly all teams on the grid like a hot knife through butter, leaving a fire behind him Every. Single. Time. (you gotta respect the man at least for his ability to cause drama everywhere) and that this is not the first time he is not in a back-marker team.

And you can understand the hype to a certain extent...jeez, dude’s forty-one and races brilliantly with as much as fire as before; (disclaimer: as much as i can dislike the man, i can still recognise as a great racing driver, because you really would have to be blind not to see it); but there is a limit to it which i think has been crossed and it’s about deserving something…deserving a better team, deserving a third world championship, deserving to win races…

“(...) can fernando bring home a third and much-deserved title this year?”

pray tell how exactly this third title ‘much-deserved’? and i fully understand media tactics, content creation, boosting engagement, clicks, likes etc. etc., it’s all part of the game, i know…but why is it that fernando is the one who ‘deserves’ it? Why is the media suddenly capable of using the narrative of ‘deserving’ in relation to someone like fernando alonso?

And why that narrative can never be present in relation to one lewis hamilton? The answer’s pretty easy, no? But it runs deeper…because the media don’t want to like lewis hamilton. they didn’t want him to win in 2021, that much is obvious if you rewatch literally any race from that season and listen to the narrative around him and max…the ‘dethroning’, the ‘young-pretender’ etc. the elements where all there, they were ready, waiting impatiently for the new champion, their new ‘face of f1’ (how’s that working out for them eh?) and when ad21 came about…which was even better for the show because the stakes were all that higher with the two of them on equal points…until of course, lap 57, it was all going slightly against the script, wasn’t it? But then they did their little rule-breaking, ‘human error’, whatever you want to call it and so what? max verstappen champion of the world.

lewis hamilton couldn’t afford to say anything. he couldn't because of who he is. And the media knew it. They would swallow him up like wolves. They would pounce on him, rip him up, mix him with dirt; and if they don’t do that (because he disappeared for a few months) they will sickly glorify his composure, his class, monetise his trauma etc. And we see it to this day…his silence was glorified; last year, sky f1 knew perfectly well what strategy to take; they’ve got their new champion; there’s no asterisk to that title- martin brundle (ironic you had to clarify that bud), or better yet say ‘move on’,‘it wasn’t that bad, just a mistake’, ‘you can’t change it’’, yeah because you wouldn’t like it to be changed, would you? You never wanted a black man to break that record, did you?

oh and also thank god lewis came back to the sport, and oh how amazing it is that merc built a shitbox of a car, so we can now again talk about how ‘he still hasn’t recovered from ad21’, let’s again use his trauma, say he’s finished, that he’s struggling, let’s make a mockery out of it all, yeah…and max, oh you know, he drives like a champion, he deserved that title, you win it over a season- martin brundle, again (it’s always the same suspects, isn’t it?)

He deserved it, here it is again. max verstappen deserved his titles (rule-breaking and cost cap breaches under the carpet); he’s a pure racer, you know. All he cares about is racing. He’s pure talent and passionate.

fernando alonso deserves his third title, apparently. He works hard. He empowers his team. He works well with his new, young teammate. He’s got the experience, the maturity and the talent. He’s the oldest driver on the grid, but he’s driving better than ever.

Lewis won’t get that because he’s alone as the only black man in this sport, which will continue to isolate him, belittle him, but also will use him. Lewis won’t ever get the alonso treatment. He won’t be willed on, cheered on, no. No, never.

Same old. Same old.

#f1 #lewis hamilton

[bitchfitch]

I hate researching anything to do with elden ring bc it exposes me to so many people doing backflips to deny that the plot of the story... is the plot of the story.

long ass lore ramble below the cut. but tldr. Miquella is a grown ass man and Mohgs plan is dumb as shit bc he is going to get turned into a soot stain .2 seconds after miqy wakes up,

Like. Ok. there's this queen, Marika, simplifying some things here, but she's the human embodiment/avatar of this God™, to the point we can just call her a goddess so I don't have to explain what the fuck is going on with the Greater Will.

As queen her second in command is the Elden Lord. at the time of the game, there has been 2 Elden Lords¹. Her first husband, and her second husband. As the player, your goal is to become the Elden Lord.

When you get all the way to the end of the game you you marry Marika. Becoming her third Elden Lord. (alternatively you can marry a different woman, Ranni, who's goal is to become a goddess herself and replace Marika as god-queen, so you'll be her Elden Lord instead.)

so we can all agree that Elden Lord as a title, is the title of whoever is married to the god-monarch, right?

and so when a character says they want to be Elden Lord, under the golden order, they intend to marry the god-monarch that is the only way, they know of, to be Elden Lord.

So when the demigods went to war over who was going to be Elden Lord, not king or queen, elden lord, they were fighting to marry Marika. Who is the mother, father (don't ask), or both (don't ask, again) of all the demigods.

which is where my pet peeve comes in. Mohg, my favorite idiot clown, doesn't want to marry Marika. he wants nothing to do with his Mother who dropped him and his twin down a sewer.

Instead Mohg wants to marry one of the empyreans.

Ranni you remember her, Miquella, and Malenia are the empyreans², Ranni is MIA, Malenia is scary, and Miquella is conveniently comatose because he is actively attempting to make the transition from empyrean to God™ and then God-Monarch³ after he kills his momdad⁴. Marika.

which Is To Say. it makes me bonkers when people act like Mohg is the odd man out here. Like He's the weird one for wanting to marry a member of his own family. That's the normal part of his plan! the part that's weird and stupid is he is presuming Miquella won't fucking obliterate him the second he wakes up. He saw the competition for (basically) the corpse of his mom, and said Fuck that, and decided to test his luck with this actively ticking down bomb.

"no people think he's weird for wanting to marry Miquella because Miquella is a child!⁶" no he's not. Miquella and Malenia. are twins. a thing about twins is, they are always roughly the same age. If one of these is an adult so is the other.

¹ there was another elden lord, a dragon who's name I'm not going to try to spell, before the age of Marika and her shit family. no one cares about him. he is included as an asterisk for the pedants.

² Miquella and Malenia are Empyreans by blood bc they're the people Marika is both mother and father too. They have no human half like everyone else. Ranni (Marika is her dad) is an empyrean because she killed her human body and kept her god soul. this asterisk is bc God is this a dumb ass family tree that's annoying and confusing to think about.

³ I've intentionally left Radagon out of as much of this explanation as possible. I do not want to explain Marika making a second her who is a man, so he could go marry this human queen to ensure an alliance with her, father a few problems, and then divorce her to go marry Marika, who he is, and then father two more problems. ⁵

[⁵ Maybe three? Personally I'm pretty sure Melina is a Millicent type situation where she doesn't have a father, unlike the twins who's father and mother are the same person but not in a way that makes sense. but I don't think there's any in game confirmation either way]

⁴ Miquella might be a trans girl? Elden Ring is weird about gender, but that's why I'm still using Monarch instead of king in case she decides to come out and be Queen Trina. Personally I think it would be cool if she was gender fluid but that's a Different Post.

⁶ The man is old enough to start a cult, become a God™, command armies, and send his sister to go fight their shit half brother and permanently destroy part of their continents eco system. Literally. he is Just Short. "he's cursed to be eternally young!" how has that manifested outside of him being scrawny and mildly weaker than the outer gods? He uses people thinking he's a kid to his advantage! He knows how people perceive him as weak despite Malenia herself calling him the scariest of all the demigods for his ability to make people love him and drive people insane. He's a grown ass man and you're falling for the same trick Mohg did and everyone agrees, that guys a fucking idiot.

⁷ I didn't know where to put the three fingers and their ending, but They're an option too. Honestly. I've got suspicions about them and their connection to miq but Not Going There

#im still of the firm opinion that the funniest thing fromsoft could do with the dlc is make it Explicitly clear #that Miquella has no fucking clue hes been kidnapped or who mohg even is. #I want that man obliterated on Accident. #just utterly not on Miquella's radar in any way shape or form #like i ship them obviously but thats because im a sucker for the nightmare that would be their relationship if Miquella wasn't in a coma #i do not want them to be canon in any way

[trainingdummyrabbit]

ok ive been thinking about it a while but im thinking about angela again. specifically about the way she functions physically, as a machine.

during lobcorp, angela never really did much outside of the whole Perfect Assistant thing. can of worms, but it's not an immediately terribly physically demanding thing. and then, towards ruina, she becomes a bit more active, but still never participates in any of the receptions herself. and then theres the whole Becoming Human thing. but that's not really what im here about.

specifically, im curious if angela can even... get. hurt. at all. weve seen her get swung at a few times during ruina, but even those have their asterisks-- the library's protection, her becoming less mechanical, and so on-- but just on her own, is she just... fine? can she take physical damage?

what im getting at is, how is her upkeep? does she need to worry about any of that at all? i can see her being built to deal with a lot given um. the environment. but mechanics are a delicate thing-- even With the way the setting is. how would repairs even Work? and additionally, has she ever had to deal with them before?

and a step past that, how would they handle that post-lobcorp, when the people responsible for her, the ones who Know how she works, are um. not exactly. able. to. closest one is hokma, but... again, can of worms.

and then, talking about angela's thought processes, how she functions-- i can't imagine she's ever been like... off. for very long. if at all. she's spent a lot of time keeping everything together, keeping things in order, constantly storing and retrieving information and executing processes-- something like that must be pretty strange.

...am i making sense? what im saying is, theres something very interesting to be said about vulnerability, the symbolism of raw mechanics and technology behind a seemingly impenetrable surface of metal, of self-image and fallibility and trust and care.

can you see the line?

wounds can heal and scars can fade, but what about angela?

#piktalk #projmoon #icould be waffling on about nothing but i do Think. #in which General Worrying About Angela kinda spirals into something else. #how weird must it be; to undergo maintenance as a constantly-running process? #to spend so long constantly aware and running and making connections and on and on-- what would happen if she needed to switch off a while? #for someone running on high that intensely-- is the silence long? or is unconsciousness imperceptibly short? ...which is scarier? #and most importantly; to repeat words that still dig deep into my heart-- #will she dream? #much to think about.

[kutyozh]

Gender-neutral German

OK so one could do a doctorate on this I guess but I simply want to make a little introduction because German learners may not be familiar with this concept and may get confused when seeing seemingly random little characters in the middle of a word. So here we go.

In German, there are a few ways to use gender-neutral language. I'm going to list some of them with pro and cons.

Participles

This is probably the most 'stealthy' way to use gender-neutral language in German. Example:

❌ Die Studenten essen in der Mensa. ✅ Die Studierenden essen in der Mensa. ❌ Die Mitarbeiter sind in einer Besprechung. ✅ Die Mitarbeitenden sind in einer Besprechung.

Pro: Stealth Level 100 Con: Not always applicable; works better with plural forms because articles are not split by gender there

2. Asterisk

❌ Die Schüler haben heute frei. ✅ Die Schüler*innen haben heute frei. ❌ Köche haben einen anstrengenden Job. ✅ Köch*innen haben einen anstrengenden Job.

What happens here is that you use the feminine form, and insert an asterisk in front of the feminine suffix (between root and suffix). In some cases this makes for a 'perfect' separation of the masculine and the feminine form (Schüler/Schülerinnen -> Schüler*innen); sometimes, as is the case with Köch*innen (Köche/Köchinnen), the masculine plural ending is cut off. Another example is Ärzte/Ärztinnen -> Ärzt*innen. With singular forms, the use of articles will look like this: der*die Ärzt*in ein*e Köch*in

The asterisk is sometimes pronounced as a glottal stop, sometimes it's 'ignored' in spoken language.

Pro: Inclusive; the asterisk marks all other genders outside of the (grammatical) binary. Con: Can be tricky to use; no general consensus over handling e.g. Dative: einem*einer Ärzt*in vs einem*r Ärzt*in

3. Underscore

❌ Chefs sollten generell mehr Lohn zahlen. ✅ Chef_innen sollten generell mehr Lohn zahlen.

Same procedure as above, but with an underscore instead of an asterisk. The underscore is sometimes pronounced as a glottal stop, sometimes it's 'ignored' in spoken language.

Pro: Relatively inclusive; some people feel like the underscore represents a 'gap' instead of non-binary genders and therefore reject the underscore. (Personally I don't prefer it either.) Con: Not accepted by all people outside the binary; can be tricky to use; no general consensus over handling certain concepts

4. Colon

❌ Die Rechte von Bauarbeitern sind wichtig. ✅ Die Rechte von Bauarbeiter:innen sind wichtig.

Same procedure as above, but with a colon instead of an asterisk or underscore. The colon is sometimes pronounced as a glottal stop, sometimes it's 'ignored' in spoken language.

Pro: Inclusive Con: Can be tricky to use; no general consensus over handling certain concepts Personally I prefer the colon over the asterisk and the underscore. It's mostly gut feeling but also the colon is like. at the same 'level' visually speaking as your regular minuscules so it makes me feel more included. As I said, gut feeling.

5. Replacing 'Mann'

So I guess this depends a bit but basically you replace the 'mann' in compounds with 'mensch', 'person', or, in plural, 'leute' or 'personen'. If that sounds weird, the word might get changed altogether:

❌ man ✅ mensch ❌ jemand ✅ jemensch ❌ Partner (not gender neutral in German!) ✅ Partnerperson, Beziehungsperson; Partner:in (Partner*in, Partner_in) ❌ Kaufmann ✅ Person im kaufmännischen Bereich ❌Müllmann ✅ Müllentsorger:in (Müllentsorger*in, Müllentsorger_in)

Again, this is easier in plural:

❌ Kaufmänner ✅ Kaufleute ❌ Müllmänner ✅ Müllabfuhr

Pro: Inclusive Con: if you are a German learner, this might be the option that is hardest to use (if you plan on using gender-neutral German), because it is not immediately evident how these generically masculine words get replaced or transformed.

6. "Binnen-I" ⚠

The so-called "Binnen-I" refers to the capitalised letter "I" in the middle of gendered nouns, and it works like the colon version (but without the colon):

SchülerIn, SchülerInnen LehrerIn, LehrerInnen

often accompanied by articles with a slash: der/die SchülerIn

Pro: relatively easy to use Con: does not include non-binary genders! This is not truly gender-neutral! It only includes the feminine and the masculine form!

7. Brackets ⚠

Probably my least favourite thing. Boo. It puts the feminine ending in a little cage:

Schüler(innen) Mitarbeiter(innen)

Pro: visually very obvious that we are talking about women and men (not only women) Con: does not include non-binary genders! This is not truly gender-neutral! It only includes the feminine and the masculine form! It has also been criticised for suggesting that the feminine ending is 'optional'/'omittable' by putting it in brackets. Honestly, just don't.

This was a little introduction to gender neutral German and I hope this can explain to you why written German does not always look like the one you see in most textbooks!

#german #gender neutral language #langblr #german langblr #german grammar #. i made this in a fit some time ago i hope it helps <3 #. feel free to ask me about it via ask #r.txt

[emotionallychargedtowel]

The Eighth Sense episodes 9 and 10: All we can do is try

Wow! I think for the most part the showrunners of T8S did really well with the final two episodes. I have a few quibbles, but they managed to tie up most of the loose ends convincingly and do something worthwhile with the therapy part of the story, so I’m calling it a win.

These episodes don’t include a lot of further development of the psychological themes of the show, and for good reason. They’re too busy resolving everything that has already been brought up. But they do portray some shifts and make some statements about the characters and the larger themes they’re engaged with. Some fall a bit flat, most are good, and a few are really outstanding.

Below are the subject headings I’ll be getting into under the cut:

The final therapy scene

Being selfish

A shift for Jae Won

When it’s OK to expect “too much”

All we can do is try

Miscellaneous lingering thoughts

Tagging you again, @waitmyturtles!

The final therapy scene

Jae Won’s therapist has always had a style that is informal and blunt, plays around with boundaries, and uses humor. I would have expected her to be willing and able to use confrontation in therapy as well, because that strategy really goes along with that overall style. Well, in this episode she confronted Jae Won quite directly. She definitely didn’t pull any punches but I think she stayed within the range of reasonable therapy strategies. One thing I can say for this show’s portrayal of therapy: they have created a three-dimensional therapist character who has a specific, consistent style that is cohesive and realistic. So, a little background about therapists directly sharing their unvarnished perspective with clients. In most types of therapy work and in most styles of doing therapy, the therapist develops a conceptualization of a client early on in their time together, then revises or adds to it as they learn more. Often, certain things seem very clear to the therapist that are hard for the person themselves to see. (Of course, if you’re doing your job well, you kind of keep a mental asterisk next to any and all of these conclusions and don’t consider them confirmed until the client agrees.) The conceptualization includes not only diagnoses (which may be provisional) but also thoughts about how the client’s difficulties probably came about (a.k.a. their etiology) and thoughts about what sort of changes are needed in order for them to feel better and function in a more adaptive way.

Most of the time it’s not a good idea to just blurt those things out to the client. They usually need to come to certain conclusions on their own. There are ways of helping them toward those conclusions or feeding them small bits of them in a way that helps them to cobble together their own version of that insight on their own. But to a great extent, they have to figure it out themselves.

Still, there are some times when it makes sense to directly hand a piece of your conceptualization over to the client, even if it’s challenging for them to hear. This is what Jae Won’s therapist does. At a point where some therapists would be keeping their ideas to themselves, she comes right out and tells Jae Won he’s being selfish. In real life, this degree of confrontation would only work if the therapist was leveraging both a strong rapport and a strong base of knowledge about the client (preferably, these would have been built up over the course of years). This would be hard to show specifically in a tv series, but I’m assuming that Jae Won’s therapist has those resources in hand and is using them in this way.

And she doesn’t pull any punches! If anything, she might be intentionally putting things in a way that’s critical toward Jae Won. Why would she do that? Well, I think what she’s after isn’t just a chance to be direct with Jae Won about her viewpoint on his situation. I think she’s also hoping to give him a kind of jolt that will wake him up, so to speak. It’s related to something I wrote about in my last T8S post. There’s a theory that in order to go from a depressive, dissociated type of PTSD expression (associated with an acute “freeze” response to trauma) to a more healthy engagement with life, you have to pass through a more activating kind of PTSD symptoms (associated with a fight and/or flight acute response). This is a great example of that. Jae Won’s PTSD is very much of the freeze-y, depressive type. Getting irritated with his therapist helps him to start connecting with his emotions again, and that sort of snowballs into him getting increasingly un-frozen.

As usual, it’s hard to situate the therapy session shown at the beginning of episode 9 at a precise point in relation to other events in the story. But wherever its exact chronological position is, it definitely seems to inform the choices Jae Won makes  from that point on. It’s funny how human beings can defend ourselves against the things others say to us and seem so sure of ourselves but then, perhaps after more thought, can still take in what they said. Jae Won protested that this was how things had to be, at least for now, when his therapist pushed him. But he wound up taking what she had to say to heart. 

One of the things I appreciated most about this therapy scene was the fact that it seems to have actually made an impact on Jae Won and on the story more broadly. I’ve been worried pretty much from the start of this series that even if therapy was portrayed in a complex, realistic, but positive way, it still wasn’t likely to be shown as an agent for change. But this portion of this session seems like it at least made a significant impact. I found it really encouraging to see that.

The next part of episode 9 is the conversation Ji Hyun has with Joon Pyo and then, once she arrives, with Ae Ri. I found this scene a little bit clunky. Suddenly it’s as if Ae Ri is Ji Hyun’s therapist and not a fellow college freshman. It didn’t really seem realistic as a discussion between people their age. But it served its purpose. Ji Hyun needed a nudge to consider how Jae Won’s trauma history played into his reaction to the accident and his treatment of Ji Hyun, and this conversation got him there.

Ae Ri also exhorts Ji Hyun to be patient and careful and not try to rush things with Jae Won. Events in the story seem to show that her advice was correct. But I have some quibbles with it, which I’ll explain further below.

Being selfish

In both Jae Won’s conversation with his therapist and Ji Jyun’s conversation with Ae Ri and Joon Pyo, there’s a theme of selfishness. I want to dig a little deeper on that. Jae Won’s therapist tells him he’s being selfish. A lot of what she mentions is more along the lines of being self-absorbed. He simply isn’t considering how Ji Hyun might feel. Trauma often causes people to be more self-absorbed, so this stands to reason. But there is also an element of actual selfishness at work. Jae Won frames his avoidance of Ji Hyun as protecting his friend, and he does sincerely think he’s doing that. But he’s also trying to protect himself--in fact, I’d say that is a bigger factor for him. Avoiding Ji Hyun allows him to avoid his memories of the accident (and the reminders of his brother’s death that come with them). He thinks it will allow him to avoid suffering another loss and feeling the pain that comes with that (though in fact, for the period where he pushes him away, he’s actually causing himself to lose Ji Hyun). He doesn’t want to feel all of the difficult emotions that come with everything that has happened, and he makes that a priority over being there for someone who loves him and who has also just experienced something traumatic.

(By the way, does this dynamic--saying you’re putting another person first but not really considering their perspective, staying in your safe zone within your own head and abdicating your responsibility to someone who loves you--sound like another BL character you know? Yep, it’s a different version of the Hira Kazunari maneuver. It has a very different spin on it but there’s also a good deal of overlap. Thanks to @jemmo for pointing out this and other parallels between T8S and Utsukare, though it’s possible I’m taking this in a different direction than they would.) 

At the same time, Jae Won is a survivor of trauma. And I’d bet dollars to donuts he also experienced  complex trauma in the form of physical abuse by his dad. He just got out of the military and is still adjusting to that transition. Meeting Ji Hyun and facing the feelings he has for him is a mostly positive thing, but at the same time, it shakes up his whole world and his way of relating to others. He’s going through a lot and has a limited amount of insight into his own situation. Personally, I’d hesitate to simply label him as selfish. But his therapist’s interpretation is valid, and may have been intentionally expressed in a simple and confrontational way in order to get through to Jae Won.

What about Ji Hyun? Ae Ri doesn’t say he’s selfish, but he says during they’re conversation that he thinks he’s been selfish and she says, “What’s done is done,” seeming to tacitly agree with him. It’s true that he has been focused on what’s happening between him and Jae Won and hadn’t considered how Jae Won’s prior trauma history might be playing a role in his behavior until that point. But he’s just a kid, he just went through a traumatic experience himself, and it’s totally legitimate for him to be preoccupied with the Jae Won situation under the circumstances. 

So, are they both being selfish? Kinda. Is it that simple? No. Did they come by their self-absorption honestly? You bet they did. But they both benefit from getting a wake-up call, so it seems there’s no harm done even though that label is rather reductive.

While I’m talking about Ae Ri’s sudden turn toward sounding like a therapist, there’s another big thread in her discussion, and that is the need to approach Jae Won very carefully and gently. Honestly, I don’t really get this. It’s not a bad idea. It’s often a good idea when dealing with anyone who’s experiencing a lot of distress. But it’s also not some kind of well-known principle of relating to or repairing with a trauma survivor. I would say that it depends on the survivor and the situation. Ji Hyun has already struck out while being more overt in his pursuit of Jae Won at this point, so changing his tack makes sense. But Jae Won’s therapist got some mileage out of confronting him. I guess I just find this kind of random. Well, it figures that a freshman fine arts major might not have the most flawless psychological insights. But this, along with Ae Ri’s abrupt shift in tone, ends up feeling like another way in which this scene seems kind of half-baked.

A shift for Jae Won

Throughout episode 9, Jae Won seems to be “thawing out.” His affect starts to be less blunted from the start of the episode. I think he comes back to himself a bit more after Eun Ji tricks him into kissing her in front of Ji Hyun. I had said before these episodes dropped that his protective feelings toward Ji Hyun could get him out of freeze mode, and although I was picturing something more clear and dramatic, I think some degree of that may have played a role once he saw what seeing them did to Ji Hyun. 

For a second, when Yoon Won meets with Ji Hyun and Jae Won to talk about writing a report for the university on how the accident happened, I thought they were actually going to sit down and hash out what happened and try to sort through the roles they played. Honestly, I think it could have been great. It could have functioned as a form of exposure, which counteracts the temptation to avoid that fuels PTSD. It could have been an opportunity to expose the cognitive distortions that Jae Won was harboring in his attempt to blame himself for the accident. They had a neutral, but kind, third party present that could have kept them from being so reactive toward each other that they couldn’t accomplish their task. But they the story went another route. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was a missed opportunity. There was still an important moment here, though--Ji Hyun reaching for Jae Won’s hand and persevering even after Jae Won initially shrugs him off. The way it was filmed was so evocative.

I loved that Ji Hyun bought Jae Won a new camera. I don’t particularly think he knew the connection between Jae Won’s old camera and his younger brother, though it’s possible. It seems like he was more motivated by wanting to, as he put it in his card, “support [Jae Won’s] dream.” Then he ended up re-enacting Jae Won’s brother’s gift in a way. I wouldn’t have assumed that would be helpful in real life, but it could be, and in this instance it seems that it was. There was definitely a nice full-circle aspect to it, narratively speaking.

All of this, together, made for a pretty convincing progression leading to Jae Won opening back up to and finally responding to Ji Hyun. Pretty convincing, within the realm of fiction. And I desperately wanted a happy ending for this show, so I’m definitely not complaining there. But relative to the can of worms the showrunners had opened up in the last two episodes, I felt like the change in Jae Won that was needed for a happy ending wasn’t quite earned. Maybe I have a little too much background knowledge of trauma for my own good? I’ve seen, and experienced, how much time and work it takes to come back from the state Jae Won was in during episodes 8 and 9, but if I knew a little less maybe I wouldn’t perceive a disconnect here. I guess if I could change something I would either have made things a bit less extreme when Jae Won hit bottom or I would have included a more dramatic plot twist to get to the resolution, one that could have balanced out the intensity by giving him some sort of huge motivation to get out of his rut. Which probably would have involved torturing both him and Ji Hyun even more, which of course I didn’t want. But I guess I’d still prefer something that seemed more realistic to me.

In the end I’m reminded of Utsukushii Kare again (”what doesn’t remind you of Utsukushii Kare, Towel?” you may ask, and you’d have a point). At the end of season 1, UK led the audience down a path toward a well-composed ending. But when I rewatched it and looked at it more closely, it seemed a little convenient, and more than a little bit sudden, that Hira finally got his head out of his ass when he did. And then what happened when we got to season 2? He’d reverted to form in a lot of ways. It was frustrating to an extent, but I was glad. Because it made more sense for that character to have to put in more time and work to earn that degree of change. If we get more of The Eighth Sense--and I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened, since the showrunners have already dropped hints--I think we might see them doubling back a bit into those pieces that don’t seem fully resolved here.

When it’s OK to expect “too much”

I wrote in my last T8S post about Ji Hyun’s comment about wanting to help Jae Won heal. Basically, I said that there was likely some degree of naïveté on display there, but at the same time, I think that those of us watching the show from the United States and other places where individualism is the rule have a bias against the idea of wanting, asking for, or expecting a certain level of care from the important people in our lives--a level of care that is actually quite reasonable. One of my favorite things about the last two episodes of T8S is that there are moments when the show makes a strong case for normalizing expecting a lot from--and being willing to offer a lot to--one’s partner. 

This gets shown metaphorically in the “game” Ji Hyun introduces to Jae Won toward the end of episode 10. Here’s how I wrote it down in my notes:

JH: Hyung.

JW: Yes?

JH: Do you know that game?

JW: What game?

JH: Take two steps back. (JW's hesitant.) Come on.

(JW steps back, looking just a little bit forlorn.)

JH: If you take two steps away from me, I'll...take three steps towards you.

(He does, then steps back to his former position again.)

JH: Take two steps forward.

(JW does.)

JH: If you take two steps forward, I will be here waiting.

This was without a doubt my favorite moment in the last two episodes, possibly of the series as a whole. It’s a really meaningful statement of commitment. I’ve written about the pursuer-distancer dynamic in BLs in the past. I didn’t see a lot of it in this series. I think that’s because we just barely get to see Jae Won and Ji Hyun’s relationship get off the ground and there are so many other obstacles they have to overcome that they don’t get that many chances to run into challenges in that area. But i think that framework is useful for talking about the “game.” In a very real sense, Ji Hyun is saying, “if you distance yourself from me, I’ll pursue you. If you pursue me, I won’t distance myself.” The healthiest way to handle pursuer-distancer roles in a relationship isn’t to avoid ever pursuing or distancing. It’s to stay flexible enough that either partner can pursue or distance at different points when it’s needed without getting calcified into one habitual, exaggerated role. That’s part of what Ji Hyun describes here. He’s also describing a determination to stay steadfastly emotionally available even in the face of the kind of circumstances that drive both pursuing and distancing. It’s beautiful.

All we can do is try

There’s one thing The Eighth Sense has over Utsukushii Kare (season 2, specifically), and that is that Jae Won and Ji Hyun openly acknowledge something that Hira and Kiyoi never state directly (and maybe haven’t even figured out yet at the end of season 2). In the last scene, Ji Hyun asks Jae Won if he thinks they’ll be OK, and he replies, “All we can do is try.” He’s echoing both Ji Hyun’s boss and Yoon Won here, as both have made this point in different ways. (It reminds me of the old-fashioned screenwriting convention of having any really important piece of information repeated three times.) There are no guarantees and there’s no ironclad way to make sure things will work out. In fact, things are bound to not work out in some respects. The trick is to be able to sit with that and keep going anyway. I have a few last unwritten Utsukare posts living in my brain and one of them is about the “contradictory” or “bittersweet” feeling both Hira and Kiyoi talk about in their voiceovers during season 2 and how I think what they’re describing is just the inherent contradictory nature of loving someone. Loving someone means being drawn to them, wanting to be with them, feeling willing to put yourself out there for them, but it also involves a risk that can be deeply scary (even scarier if you have as much baggage as Hira and Kiyoi). But this never gets stated--it’s like neither of them quite figures it out. But by the end of The Eighth Sense, Jae Won understands this. He may still need some more time to fully take it in, but at least he’s aware of it on an intellectual level. Love is risk and there’s no way to avoid that aspect of it, but it can be more than worth it. “Let's try it together,” Jae Won tells Ji Hyun, “even if we're afraid.”

Miscellaneous lingering thoughts

I’m not entirely happy with the way Dae Hyung and Eun Ji were redeemed. Jae Won’s discussion of Dae Hyung’s genuineness took me by surprise and made a degree of sense. I’m not entirely sold on it, but I’m more sold on it than I would have expected. But Eun Ji? It’s like by the end of episode 10, she’s had a complete personality transplant. And then she makes that nonsensical comment about the five senses? I found it all a bit ham-fisted.

I loved the “don’t just treat me cute” scene. It was (sorry, Ji Hyun) cute as hell, and it introduced some additional complexity to the characters and their relationship. But I think it was also a deliberate response to BL tropes, especially tropes that many have noted are particularly widespread in Korean BLs. Jae Won is pretty clearly a seme figure in the story. He does most of the pursuing. He also has some of the more stereotypical seme qualities. He’s older, he’s a bit taller, and he has a broader build than Ji Hyun. He’s the “hyung” in more ways than one. But whereas we might expect Ji Hyun, the younger, somewhat smaller uke, to become like a “blushing maiden” type in the bedroom, he shows a completely different side here. “Don't just treat me cute,” he says. “You don't know what's coming.” He smiles during that last part, and it’s at least partially lighthearted. But that line is also sincere. And it acts as a kind of commentary from the showrunners. “You don’t know what’s coming,” they tell us. “The seme/uke role split, age, and relative size of these characters doesn’t predict how they’ll relate to each other sexually.” Good for them! More BLs should include gestures like this one.

I love that Yoon Won and Joon Pyo hooked up. They’re both such straightforward sweeties that it makes sense that they didn’t waste any time wondering if the other was into them or worrying about the implications and instead just skipped ahead to hardcore making out. Also, heaven forbid an older woman take an interest in a younger man! That aspect seemed like another way of pushing against conventions.

I’ve made quite a few critical comments about the final two episodes here, but I want to make it clear: I thought these episodes, as well as the series overall, were really well done. I enjoyed the series a lot. It stumbled in places, mostly because it’s so ambitious. But the result is really admirable.

#The Eighth Sense #the eighth sense meta #the eighth sense discussion #the eighth sense analysis #psychology of bl #jae won x ji hyun

[cerisezero]

I keep thinking about the times that someone has looked at the idea of writing their language and gone '…yeah no I'm gonna fix that' or 'yeah I want a piece of that action' and made it happen, for any reason. And I'm gonna make noises about it for a little bit. Maybe highlight a couple of things.

You've got King Sejong in Korea going "OK. The script we're using now is hella complex and …Chinese. I want something that's easy enough for a farmer to learn. And maybe to pay his taxes with." And he works out hangul, neat and logical and frequent winner of Best Writing System awards if such things exist. (And then the nobles don't like it because how are they supposed to look smart if the peasants can write too?)

You've got Sequoyah, thinking the settlers he's doing business with might have at least one good idea in this whole 'talking leaves' system they're using. So he throws himself into working out a syllabary that works for the Cherokee language even when his friends and family think he's losing the plot or he's possessed or… Anything. But he hangs in there. Teaches his daughter. Proves that this is something worth it, and goes on to see the syllabary he created become official and used throughout the Cherokee Nation.

These are the best known ones. But how many are there out there?

There are systems where a missionary or someone similar's come into a place, and gone 'hm, Latin ain't cutting it for writing this' - the Cree syllabics and their extended Canadian family fall into this box, though there's at least some accounts that dispute the usual story. (Given that a lot of those sort of stories come down to 'so we can make a Bible at these people', it's fair to put a big old asterisk on them, but… they're a thing.) Getting away from that issue, though? There's local creators making a bespoke system for their language when the ones they'd picked up from outside just don't fit the sounds or grammatical patterns. Writing systems that can really belong to a language and its people.

While it's absolutely not my place to say whether something is good or bad - the only people who can do that are the language users and community the script was made for - there can't help but be a few that catch the eye. For example, I'm quite fond of the Ditema tsa Dinoko script - it's a pretty recent creation from South Africa as a script for a wide range of Bantu languages, using compact triangular blocks in a way that reflects traditional patterns from Sesotho tradition. From my outside perspective, it's an elegant script. It's just one example, though - there's many creators in Africa who have done similar things, sitting down and making a script that their language needs and that isn't being shoved on them by… yeah. Vai and N'Ko are the biggest examples but there are so many! Moving on, in Oceania, we find the Avoiuli text from Vanuatu, designed so that any one character can be drawn with one stroke in the sand… and elsewhere, the scripts being created to use with signed languages which haven't used them in the past…

If I were to try and go into all of them, it'd be a whole essay. And I'd probably miss some as I'm an outsider nerd without access to the deep literature on some of this stuff. Instead, I'll link to The World's Writing Systems as an index to browse through - unfortunately, it doesn't allow searching by how the writing system was created. But there are plenty of indigenous scripts listed there too that deserve their own deep dive. (The fact it lists con-scripts specifically made for fiction… eh.) Their icon comes from the Afaka script, for the Ndyuka creole in Suriname. A lot of the letters are quite pictorial in nature - including the 'ka' in WWS's icon. Gotta say, that's a way to make things memorable.

…anyway, that's my ramble for today. Just gonna wrap with this source which I haven't fully investigated yet, and Endangered Alphabets which isn't so much for deliberately constructed scripts but (unsurprisingly) for endangered ones in general, and as such plain deserves a link.

Now I go back to my own scribbling. Maybe I'll finish a con-script enough to show off one day. Even if one rather smaller in goals.

#writing #writing systems #language #constructed scripts #conscript #long post #i like words :3 #just a ramble

[infini-tree]

ok so... here’s krupp’s house interior recreated to the best of my ability! here’s some comments because i have Thoughts on it.

general

i don’t know what’s in the art book when it comes to krupp’s house. even if it was completely mapped out, it may not even be accurate to the final version seen in movie-- i know at the very least some older concepts where there was evidence of a pet bowl and a cat tower, but i’m not factoring that for obvious reasons.

this is not to scale, so some parts may be off.

fun fact after looking at these screencaps for ages: every part of krupp’s house has a different wallpaper pattern. i think that’s just fun. and it makes things/placement easier to identify! :)

to summarize my thoughts on this house: really, only the living/dining situation is the part i’m the most sure of, and that’s only because they’re confirmed to be next to each other. the placement of everything other room is more out of “common sense” that i’ll explain.

the parts of the house labelled with an asterisk ( * ) are those that are theorized to be there because of logistics. we don’t see a laundry, or hall closets in the boys’ montage, but its there to both fill out space and to be a bit “realistic” in terms of Where Does Krupp Keep His Stuff/Clean His Clothes.

The Closet At The End Of The Hallway is mostly for me as i put it there for sticky notes au reasons. you could easily swap it and where the laundry room is.

the exterior layout seen in the movie is completely disregarded. if it was, then the left half of his house would be gone. that being said, i tried to keep it as completely square as possible. there are a few particular discreprencies i had to contend with i’ll explain in later sections.

dining room / kitchen

i’m skipping the living room because there’s not much to say about it. like harold says, it looks nice! though, a bit empty.

his kitchen/dining situation is wild. typically one would just connect the two rooms directly like you would krupp’s living/dining, but this dining room shot implies that there’s a bit of hallway between the two spaces? it makes it feel a lot more congested than it needs to be. who ok’ed this? is it the same guy who put krupp’s office on the second floor as opposed to the front door? but i digress.

also its extremely extra of him to just have one chair when these sorts of things come in a set.

as for the kitchen itself... its honestly frustratingly vague considering how close the shots associated with it are. 

the shot showing the drawer shows a light source implied to be a window with blinds, but the reverse shot shows that there’s no room on harold’s right to facilitate a window. this is one of those discrepancies i had to either do one or the other for and i just decided to add the window (albeit a small one).

i also added a door leading to the backyard, mostly as a logistics thing. the other neighboring houses have one on the side, so there’s a precedence for it.

bathroom

the shot is pretty self explanatory. i’m not sure if krupp has a shower or a bathtub considering that the frosted glass obscures the view. the height of the porcelain in relation to the toilet makes me think ‘bathtub’, though.

bedroom

also self-explanatory. had to do a bit of gymnastics when formatting the closets to make it not stick out on the floor plan. honestly the most contentious thing about where i placed it is because right outside the bedroom door, the hall might extend to the left. due to the fact hat the boys are right in front of the shot its hard to tell, but i decided on it not being it.

also its a little silly how krupp decorates his own room with what seems to be one of his degrees/principal’s license. even in his home life and doesn’t need to perform it, he’s leaning into the principal identity.

#mells thinking out loud on her blog again #ch: the lid's open and has been fermenting ever since #captain underpants

[not-close-to-straight]

I have a question about the Mutating Peter tag on Territorial. How graphic is the mutating described? I have a weird squick, but I really want to read your story. If it's not more graphic than Wade's transformation in Gold then I think I'll be OK.

Thank you! I love your work! ❤❤❤

It is LESS graphic than Wade's transformation in Gold and if you've read Codependent, it is WAY LESS graphic than how insane Peter gets in that fic.

His mutation is shown more in like.. "oh look what I can do now and look how my morals have skewed the less human I become" vs "jesus fucking christ, him eyeballs are straight up freaky and also he's probably gonna eat your liver right in front of you"

Also, the MORE graphic part of Territorial is the descriptions of blood drinking and the (horny) effects on Peter. Not so much body horror like it was in Gold and Codependent.

Definitely DO read the story because it's frankly awesome. Stories where Peter and Wade are just gonna love each other even if they have to burn the world down to make it work are EXCELLENT and so much fun to write.

I'm getting ready to update chapter four lierally in a few minutes, which is the first time we see the blood drinking and I'll add an in chapter asterisk note so you can skip that scene if needed. Chapter five is where we start seeing Peter change/get more of the blood drinking and I'll update each chapter with specific warnings as well the asterisk note parts so you can just skip if needed!

Cheers! And happy reading!

[starlightshore]

explain Danny phantom to someone who’s never seen it before?

uhhhhh so i can only talk about it as the most insane kinda fandom person because

i was obsessed with this show when it first aired when I was 8 years old. it was my first fandom. i read fanfic for it before i even knew what fanfic was. its HEAVILY tied to my nostalgia and I've been engaging with the fandom on/off for literally 19 years. at this point DP is in my DNA.

while it's not my main hyperfixation (thats undertale) its the one tag i visit regularly and the one fandom I'll jump to every few months and binge fics for. i don't even read UT fics anymore but the DP fandom is always doing something. its very active!

under the cut I talk about my thoughts on the show, the fandom and explain the premise. It's a wild ride.

TLDR; i have a lot of THOUGHTS on this show and i do not actually recommend it. MAYBE if you're curious explore the fandom and some fics but be careful about it, it's a bit gratuitous with its angst.

If you want a basic premise: local 14 year old accidentally lets loose hell but also has become part ghost. This kid can fit SO much trauma in him.

first off: I fucking love Danny Phantom.

And I'm going to spend the next two segments complaining about it. Feel free to skip if you're already aware of this /or don't wanna linger on it.

Second off: This show fucking sucks*

* Ok fine yes sometimes it can be good, but it will always have an asterisk next to it.

it has NOT aged well. it was created by an asshole who's got a long shitlist of things he's done and still does that's all terrible. i am not one to hate someone publicly unless its for something like this. Feel free to google what Bitch Fartman has done if you're curious but I'll warn you: he is a horrible person and he disgusts me. I only acknowlege him when its to mention how awful he is and how I do not want to support him.

This is not like with FNAF where supporting that franchise supports Scott. Danny Phantom first aired 19 years ago. The show was written, directed, and sure as hell animated by a team of professionals. It is not his sole creation. Studio Animation is not the sole work of an individual. I respect (most) animators and the hard work they've done and do. IIRC Shitfartman doesn't even have the rights to the IP anymore. I assume he gets residuals though. That said the only canonical piece of media we've gotten is a graphic novel that was released last month. Up until then, supporting DP was just not literally a thing you could do!

Its not just the creator who sucks. There's a lot of BS in the show too.

the show is very early 2000s (and even then thats no excuse) and it has a bingo card worth of shit in it. racism, bigotry, ableism! you name it. I do not condone and i do NOT recommend this show because of this! its horrible with what they did with this show and its shocking it was acceptable enough to put on TV. you literally can't do shit like that anymore.

I'm not going to go list every detail of every horrible, fucked up thing the show has done. The list is too long and I haven't watched the actual show in a few years now. by god, I know there is a list out there though.

Anyway outside of my obligatory "fuck this show actually" rant aside

i do love this show because it DOES have a lot of good and cool stuff outside that. but also. its so much wasted potential.

the core premise is:

Hey what if a pair of paranormal obsessed mad scientist parents punched a hole into the after life hell dimension- and what if their son was basically spiderman-ed about it?

And here's the core part of the premise: Danny only keeps his identity a secret to the humans. Ghosts learn like, pretty much straight away that he's a Halfa (half human, half ghost). He's if spiderman's worst fear wasn't the villains but if like. Aunt May was going to rip him apart.

Oh yeah that's. a thing. Danny's parents literally want to rip his ghost identity apart from, and I quote, "molecule to molecule."

For a an comedy-action show its WEIRDLY morbid and dark at times but then has the tonal whiplash to make you question what the fuck did they just do. How'd they do that and then not care they just wrote that in. Seriously. It'll just lore drop or hint to dark things and then brush it aside because it's main focus is comedy.

Anyway back to explaing what the show even is about. the show likes to say Danny got his DNA merged with ectoplasm but that's stupid af i'd rather say he died but only stayed half dead. He can transform between the two states: living and dead. But he's not just two halves that make a whole -the two sides blend together. He can use his ghost powers as a human -and early on he couldn't control them so he'd just. go intangible or invisible at the worst moments.

The show just. jumps right in. You don't get to see the accident outside the intro (at least until season 2 when they retcon some stuff) you just have it thrown into your lap. He has powers now. He sucks at it. Deal with it.

I think it's important to acknowledge that this show was written before Netflix did streaming. Before Plot heavy cartoons were a thing. (Not to say they didn't have reoccuring plot, it justw asn't the same thing as it is now.) You had to write the show with the limits of:

Comedy being a major focus

You have to write it with the expectation that anyone could jump in and (reasonably) understand most things going on. While there's some continuity and plot progression, the status quo is god.

because streaming wasn't a thing yet, you could only watch the show by jumping into whatever the fuck episode was playing. I doubt it played in order all the time. You just couldn't make a cartoon that had weeks upon weeks of plot developments and expect people to keep up.

The show is, in fact, meant for kids. While it does dive into some darker stuff (being ya know, a ghost show) its still going to be overly silly.

So while YEAH i'll complain about the very very shitty things the show did but I can't soley blame Fuckhateshitman for all of it. It's the restrictions it was made under + likely a lot more circumstances I don't understand. I am a hobbiest animator. I have no real world experience in the animation industry. I can critique the final product but I can never understand what shaped the cartoon. If shitheadmcgee wasn't involved and the studio gave the show more room + had you know, more POC and women on team + animation (even for kids) was respected more then who KNOWS what the show could of been! But like. its a 2000s show. It is what it is. I think the show has its good and bad and i'll harp a lot on the bad rn because I think its important to acknowledge especially to new people, but I do want to frame it by saying it really is the product of its time.

I want it to be better and I hope if it gets rebooted its better. We expect a lot more from cartoons now then we did then. (I know this was a long tangent + kinda over simplifying things but whatever, moving on.)

The (Ph)Fandom

19 years later and here we are. Enter the Phandom (called that before that phill and whoever used the term, idc i'm still going to use the term.) We, the fandom, almost completely just retconned the show's finale. (obviously SOME people still like it but its like. an incredibly small percentage) Like. we straight up pretend it didn't happen. i don't even want to get into it rn. It was SO BAD that the graphic novel that just released literally (spoilers) retconned everything about it aside from a ship pairing.

Anyway the Phandom- personally I think it goes a little TOO harsh in its angst. LIke, maybe a bit too much. But it DOES add nuance and explores the themes and lore that the show just flat out refused to engage with at all. It really digs into the premise of "hey wtf this 14 year is half dead. hello? hello??? thats fucked up.... lets explore that." and i'm here for it.

As long as its not like, masochistic and gratuitous for no real reason. 😬That is my biggest complaint with the fandom is that sometimes it goes over board.

But yeah outside of that, it can also be VERY silly so expect tonal whiplash here too! We got memes. We got fandom holidays and events. Whacky stuff.

OH AND OCs. We have fandom OCs like Wes. The best nonexistant character ever. Love that lil weirdo <3. His whole schtick was "What if Danny had another human villain? What if this random background classmate knew his secret and was trying to expose it?" and its spiraled from there. No one ever believes Wes and he's tortured by it. Some make him out to be a conspiracy nut while others make him more of a threat. (or a joke, as I do) Considering this show has a ghost-version of the Men in Black (Guys in White) conspiracy actually lines up accurately for what Wes does. And, you know. The Fenton's have a portal to the afterlife in their basement. Honestly pretty reasonable.

so like the fandom just kinda... picks and chooses the canon. It does have an edge of "we can do better" but in fairness, as I just discussed, there's an awareness that the version we make is not restricted by the environment the show was made under. I would hope most of the fandom understands this and doesn't say it in the sense of like "oh yeah I know better than professional writers and artists fuck the show 1000%" instead of acknowledging Yes He Fucking Sucks but its also more complicated. I don't want to foster an environment of superiority and disrespect to any media/creators (with exceptions ofc) cause. Jesus christ we live on the internet in 2023 you have to know why I feel this way by now.

Anyway with that in mind, I do think it's a positive thing! I mean, fuck, the show had no new content for almost 20 years I think its obvious by now we'd just make our own doll house out of it by now.

So yeah the Phandom is like this:

We're oddly consistent with the phandom lore we've built around from the canon's lore. We expand it, we make it more queer, we do our own thing. And I really enjoy it! I partake in it! It's pretty cool.

So while there's some merit to the OG show I would not recommend it on account of the amount of BS I mentioned at the start of the post. But I would recommend the fandom! As long as you got a strong black list with trigger warnings in place. Again, I think the fandom is a lil too gratuitous. But oh my god I love so much of what the fandom does. There's so many fics that just stick with me and (ha) haunt me. There's a reason I still come back after all these years. there are SO many good fics.

also the fandom got adopted by the DC fandom a year or two ago. personally i have to have like 80 tags blocked so i can even navigate the tag. Its not my thing but i'm happy people are having fun!!

#personal stuff #dp talk

[bidokja]

do u have any manhwa/webnovel recs? preferably stuff like orv but its ok if its different too :D <3

I actually have a whole list of different series I'm currently reading if you're interested in that, but if you want my personal ORV-ish picks...hmm. "Stuff like ORV" is a big range. Are you focused more on the genre, or the themes? The tropes, or the message? All of the above? IDK, so I'll just do my best to recommend a varied handful to you.

I have to preface this with: This is a tall order, anon. Honestly, I don't think any of these are on the same level as ORV. ORV is a whole different beast. But, one comes close, and the rest at least share a few similarities. So, here we go~!

✨ BIDOKJA'S "STUFF LIKE ORV" RECS ✨

NOTE: Links lead to MangaUpdates and NovelUpdates unless marked with an asterisk (*). These pages contain links to official and unofficial English releases, so you can choose whichever you want.

SSS-Class Revival Hunter (Novel / Manhwa) Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Supernatural Tropes: Deities, Future Knowledge, Game Elements, Hunters, Missions/Quests, Regression/Time Travel, Tower Climbing CW: Suicidal actions -> If you read only one thing on this list, read Revival Hunter. It's the only series I feel can stand on the same stage as ORV as a whole. Highly recommend the novel first, but the manhwa is a great adaption too.

My S-Class Hunters (Novel* / Manhwa) Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Supernatural Tropes: Deities, Dungeons, Future Knowledge, Game Elements, Hunters, Regression/Time Travel -> Definitely recommend the novel more here. I think the manhwa is doing an alright job of adapting it, but it makes some...unique editing choices.

Those are the two I feel are the best in quality while having some overlap with ORV. For a longer list of recs, check below the read more.

Whether the series below share more or less in common with ORV than the ones above, they're series that I feel aren't quite as good in quality. This is, of course, only my personal opinion. Plus, quality level isn't equal to enjoyment level. So don't hold back and check them out! Things in bold are ones that I personally enjoyed the most, regardless of "quality."

I Woke Up as the Villain (Novel / Manhwa)

Level Up With the Gods (Novel / Manhwa)

The Live (Manhwa)

Lout of the Count's Family (Novel / Manhwa)

The Player Who Can't Level Up (Novel / Manhwa)

Regressor Instruction Manual (Novel / Manhwa)

Return to Player (Novel / Manhwa)

Solo Leveling (Novel / Manhwa)

The Stars Are On My Side (Manhwa)

Thumbs Up, Level Up (Novel / Manhwa)

Tyrant of the Tower Defense Game (Novel / Manhwa)

The World After the Fall (Novel / Manhwa)

#ask

[linecoveredinjellyfish]

ok posting a to-do list here in the hopes that i can public forum myself into actually doing the thing.

wash dishes from breakfast

fold and put away laundry

fold and put away other laundry

wash bedding

change sheets

put non-sheet bedding items (i.e. blanket, pillow cases) back on the bed

dust furniture

sweep/vacuum floors

fiddly organizational tasks (i.e. make sure everything is in the location it's supposed to be in)

clean boots (still muddy from the ren faire last week)

one (1) relatively small homework*

organize notes and bag for class tomorrow*

shower*

touch up nail polish

figure i have bragging rights if i get this stuff 3/4 (9/12) of the way done. i have brought shame upon my family if i do less than half. asterisks on the stuff that i literally need to do today no excuses.

edit: i now officially have bragging rights and still a few spoons left over! and it's not even 6 pm!

another edit: it was 12 tasks when i wrote that bit. technically it's 14 now. but whatever it still counts.

#the bedding task is divided into smaller jobs a) because that's how it works practically and b) so i get to have more fun with crossing out #it speaks!

[ace-girlboy]

@thespianinthebackcorner ok I’m gonna lost a few keyboard thingies for discord that maybe you know already but maybe you don’t idk. A lot of them are the same as on other apps I think

*asterisks around a word for italics* **double asterisks for bold** ***triple asterisks for bold italics*** || two long lines on either side of a phrase creates a sort of censor block that can be removed when clicked on || ~~ two of the little wavy hyphens create a strikethrough~~

#a hashtag before a phrase makes it really big

:you can manually type in emojis (system or custom) with colons on either side:

You can search for gifs easily with tenor and if you want to use emoticons, make sure you add a backslash (without spaces) before the emoticon or it will turn into an emoji when you send it. There’s a setting to turn off that feature on desktop but not on mobile. Typing it looks like \:D but when it’s sent it looks like :D.

I’m terribly sorry if you know all of this, I don’t mean to be condescending or anything. As for tips of how to socialize- generally when I’m meeting new people I send them memes every once in awhile to start a conversation. They’re fun and low stakes and can easily start a conversation if the person enjoys the meme or has something to say about it. I generally will do this a few times until I feel comfortable enough to strike up a conversation without them. Again sorry if you know what I’m just trying to help TwT

Hopefully that was at least somewhat helpful ;w;